University of Wisconsin junior Noah Warren studies political science with a special interest in geopolitics. But, Warren said he became frustrated when he found no free platform displaying a picture of politics across the globe — so he built one.
Warren released Hegemon Global in early February, a geopolitical intelligence platform that tracks risk across 198 countries on an interactive 3D globe. The platform also displays 80 military bases, 70 trade routes, nuclear arsenal data and election tracking across countries.
“Every tool was either like a static report or behind a massive paywall or only covered one region,” Warren said. “…. I wanted a place where it aggregates news and you can see the global snapshot.”
Hegemon Global uses a news aggregator that pulls from over 100 sources worldwide including Western, non-Western and state media along with political bias meters for each outlet.
The platform combines articles reporting on the same topic while filtering out less important information, and then assigns a risk level to each country. Each country ranges from the lowest risk level “clear” to “catastrophic,” in which countries are undergoing a significant humanitarian crisis or active war.
Hegemon Global also creates an AI-powered summary of all the articles used for each country and a daily intelligence briefing of global news.
Warren said he hopes making this information free and widely available will help people take steps to solve global issues.
“It definitely kind of opened your eyes to how messed up the world is, especially in places you thought were fine,” Warren said.
In the future, Warren hopes to add country level analyses as it is hard to generalize large countries like the U.S. and China into one category.
Hegemon Global has already attracted the attention of several foreign policy researchers and former CIA workers. Warren said he hopes it could get recognition from government agencies in the future, but either way he said this is simply something he enjoys doing.
Warren said many aspects of international politics are interconnected. Conflicts in the Middle East will affect gas prices in the U.S., impacting the average American, he said.
“I think all this stuff, especially [being] students, affects us a lot more than it affects older people,” Warren said. “… The world’s a very messed up place right now, and it’s going to be our responsibility to fix it.”
Warren said Hegemon Global will soon be available on the App Store and he also hopes to add more trade routes and military bases along with intracountry analysis.
